Healthcare leaders need to consistently be prepared for change and to make transitions in a fast-paced industry.
Zafar Chaudry, MD, senior vice president and CIO at Seattle Children's, stopped by the "Becker's Healthcare Podcast" to talk about change and digital transformation.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full episode here.
Question: How do you make sure you have the right people in place to make the transition as smooth as possible?
Dr. Zafar Chaudry: I think we consistently underestimate the cost of change and the cost of re-engineering our business processes. My recommendation would be, we certainly learned this in our EMR shift, is a lot of money has to be allocated, and resources, to helping people understand the before and after picture of how a big system implementation is going to affect them or even putting in a new building, how it's going to affect their day-to-day job. So massive amounts of change management is needed.
Even though people say programs should be read, what I found is when you are putting in something new, there is a massive amount of business process re-engineering that needs to happen. So for us, as we embark on our [enterprise resource planning] project in finance, in supply chain, in [human resources], we will spend a lot of time looking at their existing processes and figuring out whether they are the best for the future, because of course, everybody wants to over-customize something, but if you over-customize it, then it becomes hard to maintain it. Of course, people want to take bad practices and put it into new systems, and then they wonder why the system isn't the best for what you paid for. That's really where people should be focusing a lot of their energy, and we spend a lot more time and money doing that, even though we are a technology group.